The demand for horticultural products is met increasingly often by large companies, which are capable of responding to the constantly increasing (and exacting) demand of the market, ensuring at the same time the cost containment that is now an unavoidable requirement.
In order to be able to fulfill this task, companies in the field equip themselves with large facilities that are at least partially automated and are capable of transporting, checking and/or packaging a large number of products of interest in the unit time, limiting the role of the operator to a simple supervision of the process.
In this context, moreover, it should be noted that even when they are intended for the treatment of a specific fruit (or of another specific horticultural product), apparatuses of the type indicated above are usually fed with large masses of the product to be treated, which arrive directly from the harvesting fields and for this reason are very heterogeneous.
This situation occurs for example in apparatuses for the transport, checking and treatment of cherries.
These apparatuses are in fact usually fed with crates of cherries of various sizes, which are poured indiscriminately into a loading station, where they are struck by a stream of water that entrains them toward the stations assigned to the subsequent processes.
For example, one of the first stations that this stream of water (mixed indeed with cherries) encounters has the task of separating the cherries which, in groups of two or three, are still joined by means of their respective stems, since if this separation were not performed the groups might cause jamming or clogging in the subsequent stations designed for the handling and/or treatment of one cherry at a time.
In any case, it should be noted that indeed in order to be able to perform processes, checks or other treatments on individual cherries, it is necessary to provide downstream of the loading station at least one apparatus capable of dividing uniformly the indiscriminate mass of cherries entrained by the stream of water.
More precisely, in order to allow the execution of the subsequent processes, these apparatuses must direct the cherries toward a plurality of channels arranged downstream, in which said cherries must arrive aligned one behind the other in tidy and uniform rows.
This poses problems that are not easy to solve to the manufacturing companies, since often division is entrusted to systems which are inefficient, expensive and/or require the fruits to follow paths defined by means of barriers and partitions. These elements affect the flow and allow to divert the cherries toward a plurality of channels, obtaining the desired result, but only at the price of subjecting the cherries to impacts that are sometimes violent and damage irreparably an often unacceptable percentage of said fruits.